Muramasa: the Demon Blade (Wii): Come back home, Vanillaware.

Not all that long ago, I was asked to write an article about Nintendo for the fine people over at Hashtagnerd.com. In the article, I basically complained that Nintendo basically stopped making games for Me as a gamer, because I aged out of their focused demographic of 5-12 year olds, young women, and old people. But in the article, I strategically placed a video of a game I constantly pushed at customers without success of its purchase. After the my recent review of Odin Sphere and watching this video in my article, I  decided I couldn't wait any longer and called up my friend Em Ulator and finally had to the opportunity to sit down with....

MURUMASA: THE DEMON BLADE:(Wii)

Muramasa weaves the tales of two protagonists together in Momohime and Kisuke. Momohime is a quietly reserved and introverted princess of Nakrukami Han in the Mino region. Her body is inadvertently possessed by the spirit of a foul and vile swordsman named Jinkuro. Jinkuro was looking to possess her fiance to steal his young body and his knowledge of the Yagyu sword style, but Momohime interfered allowing her body to be taken instead.

Kisuke is currently being hunted by a clan a of ninja for crime of betrayal, but Kisuke has no recollection of it. Kisuke is filled with a sense of vengeance and has a desire to find a specific katana to drive him forward as he tries to discover who he is. 

Momohime and Kiskue

I will admit right off that compared to Odin Sphere, I found this story a bit lacking. While both of the tales were interesting and fun to learn as I played through, it didn't exactly weave a complex narrative like its predecessor was able to do.  That being said, the stories are both pretty interesting and tie together well which I will assume lead to one final bonus chapter. 

Vanillaware's art style is completely unmistakable here. And while the characters are beautiful and highly detailed in all their subtle animations, something I noticed is how much attention to detail the backgrounds and settings have to them. The game involves a lot of travel so you find yourself running and fighting through various settings of Japanese countryside and there are lots of little details to each setting that bring the backgrounds to life. One of my hands down favorites is when a rainstorm kicks up in a bamboo forest. It just looks phenomenal.

While a number of the basic enemies to kill aren't all that original like the myriad of generic Ninja's you fight, there are a number of spectacular bosses based in Japanese mythology, and even better is its not the retarded, wait for the exposed weakness then attack or side step the charge style bosses. Many of them have varying attacks and patterns to follow before you can charge in blade swinging. Be it gigantic sea monster, the thunder goddess Raijin, or even just the massive foot of a demon, all the bosses have original looks to them and different ways to approach them. 

The music in this game is exceptional. Various areas have traditional Japanese sounding musics with a beautiful array of flutes, kotos, and other various traditional Japanese string instruments. It makes some of the more dull travel sequences more enjoyable to listen to. When you are attacked the song itself doesn't change, but its style picks up in tempo and turns into a hybrid of the traditional Japanese sound with an upbeat rock influence as well. Its a great compliment to the fight sequences. 

Now then, the real meat of this game comes in with its combat and its got its pluses and minuses. Unlike Odin Sphere, Muramasa had better hardware behind it in the Wii (and way better hardware with my PC) so it didn't suffer from any of the slowdown issues that the PS2 faced it with. Because of this, the combat it fast and frantic. Your characters get to hold 3 weapons at once between Katana's and Long Blades. The katana's are fast and agile weapons while the long blades are stronger but with slower with big sweeping attacks.

The backgrounds are as beautifully illustrated as the characters.

You can make over 108 different weapons that increase in strength but many of them effect your attributes and each of them have a unique special attack that you can can string in between your combos. If you let the swords charge enough, you can switch between them for a massive all screen damaging slash. They can break from overuse of the special or excessive guarding so you need to actually watch your strategy and not just swing blindly. Swords recover while not in use but if you go too fast you can be stuck with 3 broken swords.

The downside to the combat I'd say is there is no difference to the two characters. Both Momohime and Kisuke can use both types of blades and both of them use the same style between them. So if you spent the time going through a whole playthrough as one of the characters then when you pick up the other one you will be disappointed to see that they fight the same way. This is kind of a shame because Odin Sphere had 5 characters to play as and all of their fighting styles were drastically different from one another. 

Sometimes fights can get clusterfucky, but I think that adds the excitement.

While the lack of variance was a little disappointing I am willing to overlook it because the combat is just so fast and fun to play that I found the game almost impossible to put down. After a bit of a rocky start I learned a lot of the tricks and quickly was getting the point where I was herding up the enemies and slashing them for a fast combo, using a triple dash attack to send them airborne, hacking them to ribbons with an air combo, before spin slashing down to the ground. Its overall control is simplistic in design which allowed me to become immersed in it easily and not pay attention to the controller.

Speaking of, this game does suffer from the awful Super Smash Bros. control scheme of pressing up to jump. I suppose it makes sense but its never something that has flowed exceptionally well for me. You will noticed that I haven't mentioned any of the Wiimote controls or stick waggles. Why? Because it doesn't fucking use that nonsense. Actually, my experience was probably better because I had more buttons to map to so I wasn't restricted to Wiimote.

It saddens me to know that this game was generally not successful despite pretty solid reviews. It only sold about 35,000 copies in the US and barely over 64,000 world wide. Odin Sphere sold over 90,000 in Japan alone. It disappoints me because much like in my hashtag nerd article, I 100% believe it didn't sell because the people who buy Wii games are casual gamer who wouldn't know an excellent title if it was lodged into their skull from a high power rifle. Its fucking disappointing because I thought this game was amazing. Instead, it faded away into obscurity buried under mountains of fucking shovel ware.

Allegedly it was supposed to be getting and HD re-release for the PS3 and the PS Vita, but it hasn't seen the light of day. So if you are looking for something to dust off your Wii with, I would say to try and find a copy of Muramasa: The Demon Blade. It has a solid retro style of play control, beautiful visuals, good story, and fast and fun combat. I can't say I ever intend to get a Wii or a WiiU, but if I did? This game would easily be a linchpin in my collection.

Thankfully, Dragons Crown will be on the PS3.
Welcome back, Vanillaware.